What’s happening
Australia is now going to open their borders to 350 international students from July 2020.
About 30% of Australia’s student base are international-enrolled students, meaning that the entire sector almost depends on international students coming to study. In fact, education is Australia’s third largest export, behind iron ores and coal. The nationality representing the largest part of Australia’s internationally enrolled students is China.
The move will let 350 international students from low-infection countries like Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, come to Australia in July to begin the second semester in July.
This new scheme will allow selected students to go to Canberra to study for the first semester, and could lead to both:
- Other Australian states following the move in February 2021, and
- A larger number of students being allowed to go to Australia to study in the beginning of their new academic year, February 2021.
By first testing the scheme in Canberra, this can be seen as a kind of test-run, just to see how things go here first.
What does it mean for me?
This could mean good news for you as a student looking to go abroad to study. We still don’t know which or when other countries will start to open up to international students again.
Bringing back the foreign students is a wildly important thing to do for Australia, and that’s why we’re seeing it beginning to happen before they even opened up their borders to tourists again.
We still don’t know how it’s going to go, though. In fact, the move by Australia might not even happen this summer and may end up waiting until February 2021 if it gets vetoed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
The reason he would do this is pretty simple: some Australian states are still not allowing each other’s residents in. in fact, most states aren’t letting people from the state of Victoria to enter, and this is Morrison’s main concern with the scheme to let foreign students in.
“I made one thing very clear to the states and territories today, if you can’t come to your state from Sydney, then no one is coming to your state from Singapore. If your borders open for international students, then you have to open up borders for Australians,” Morrison said.
China’s warnings
But Prime Minister Morrison isn’t the only one issuing warnings about the new scheme: China’s government has also issued warnings to its students looking to go to Australia to study.
According to them, there have been many “racist incidents” in Australia towards Asian people amidst the COVID-19 crisis.
This may or may not be true.
However, the fact remains that Chinese government controlled by the Chinese Communist Party is now anti-Australian education, at least for the moment.
But, if you’re not from China, you probably don’t have to worry too much about their warnings.
So until next time, good luck getting into your universities of choice as the world slowly begins to open up.
